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Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Talisman of Resurgence and Skinning Cats

I want to apologize up front about the ranting nature of this post. My intent is not to offend anyone but I am sure that a few of my readers will see themselves in this post. I am making this post to get it off my chest as well as to educate, because I literally cannot take it anymore. The good news is that what I have to say is fairly simple.

The Talisman of Resurgence is NOT a DPS trinket!!!

If you you are a moonkin who uses this trinket as a part of your Moonkin set, then the next time you have some free time your first priority should be to replace this piece of junk. The good news is it is fairly easy to replace. Here is why you want to.

The Math:

I suspect that most people pick up the [Talisman of Resurgence] because it is purchasable with Emblems of Triumph. The funny thing is, you can pick up the [Sundial of the Exiled] with Emblems of Heroism and it is a better DPS trinket. Let me compare the two.

For the Talisman of Resurgence the math is fairly simple. If you assume that you pop the trinket on cooldown then then the proc is equivalent to 99.8 Spell power (599*(20/120) = 99.8). For the Sundial of the Exiled the math is a little more complicated. Since it is an on equip bonus we have to make some assumptions. With a 10% proc chance on average it will take about 10 casts to proc the buff. Also, most raiding moonkin should have a Wrath cast time of 1 second and a Starfall cast time of around 2 seconds, lets assume cast time for all spells of about 1.5 seconds. This means the sundial should proc about once a minute. Therefore, on average the sundial proc is worth 98.3 spell power (590*(10/60) = 98.3). If you want to assume that it procs once ever 70 seconds then the value drops to 84.3 spell power.

As you can see, in the proc department the Talisman of Resurgence has a slight advantage, and also has the benefit of being an on use and therefore less likely to be wasted. However, the advantage is slight. I wouldn't estimate it over 15 spell power.

Stat's vs Stats:

Most moonkin, have a pretty good idea of what 84 Crit rating is worth, but many get confused by the Int. We know it provides some crit and some spell power. It also has mana regen benefits but am going to ignore those because most people don't have mana issues.

The first thing to remember about Int is that it is modified by Blessing of Kings, Furor, and Improved Mark of the Wild. So, the 128 Int on the trinket is actually 158 Int in a raid situation (128 * 1.1*1.1*1.02 = 158). In terms of Crit Rating, 158 Int is worth 43.5 Crit Rating (158/166.66 = 43.5). In terms of Spell Power it is worth 19 spell power (158*0.12 = 19).

So, if you compare 43.5 Crit Rating and 19 Spell power to 84 Crit Rating it is clear that the 84 Crit Rating provided by the Sundial is clearly better then 128 Int. Since the two procs provided by the trinkets are fairly equal, then the Sundial of the Exile is clearly better because of the superior stats. Even if you value sundial with a lower uptime the two trinkets come out roughly equal.

Skinning Cats:

Some of you may be thinking, "What's the big deal? The difference between the two trinkets very small." As one forum poster put it, there is more then one way to skin a cat. I agree. The difference is small and there is more then one way to skin a cat, but just because there is more then one way doesn't mean all of those ways are equal. For example, would you rather skin the cat with a skinning knife or a machete?

The fact of the matter is there are always a bad options, good options, and the best option.

In the end I suspect that a lot of people use the Talisman because it has a high ilevel and increases gear score more then the other options. I can understand how that is tempting when dumb dumbs based pug spots purely on a number that they don't understand. That said, I would rather be excluded from a group because I geared correctly then make gearing mistakes to impress a random pug leader.

About the Blog: You may have noticed that frequency of my posts has dropped. I apologize for that. My life outside of WoW has gotten very busy over the past couple of months and unfortunately the blog has been the one to suffer. Please know that I am not planning on dropping the blog. My posts may be less frequent but I do plan to continue making them.

About My Guild: We are still recruiting. We are a serious progression guild with a relatively light schedule. We accomplish more in 9 hours a week then most guilds do in 15 or 20. For more information please send me an email or check out the website here.

27 comments:

The usual good post, thank you. I for one am really looking forward to your in depth post involving the end game raiding trinkets as I'm really not sure what order I should be trying to pick them up in and value your input above most. Thanks in advance! =)

This is a great point - that a ilevel 200 trinket would out perform an ilevel 245 trinket is really interesting.

And that it is 10 emblems cheaper as well. That is just pure gold in terms of efficient gearing information.

As a new Boomkin I like anything that has a passive proc rather than an on use power. On use might be better in terms of controlling your damage, but I think most players do not use the powers as much as they should. Having the power passive means its on by default.

It's too bad that Ventrilo is required to join your guild. I always hate to see guilds pass me up because of that. I know content is complex, but I completed most of Sunwell (not KJ) without it.

On topic, I agree. I see so many scrub moonkins on my server, half of them with that stupid trinket. They get invited to PuGs, but apparently my Starcaller and Glory of the Ulduar Raider (10 man) mean nothing...

I have been following your posts for a long time now. I wanted to say Thank you for all of your math and hard work over the time that I have been following you. Everything I know about gearing my moonkin I have picked up from this Blog. Do not worry about your frequency dropping as content is slowing down there is not a huge need for regular updates. I must say though that I checked out Graylo on Armory and I am a little shocked. It seems as if you just took the item stats from T9 content and carried the same itemization options into this new T10 content. With more haste options and greater spell power found else where I feel that you are missing out in a few places where you could pick up stats (i.e. - you are still using the same sort of items from ilevel 245 just bigger numbers) You should change a few things and that would make it so you do not have to gem hit and I will also add GEMMING CRIT?!?!? You have taught me so much and I would hate to think my little doomkin can out dps the mighty graylo.http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Shadowmoon&cn=Volunsteer

He has got himself to the haste soft cap and then emphasised crit over haste thereafter which is in line with current theory crafting.

He has gemmed hit where the socket bonus makes for a superior stat return to using a SP gem alone and has got himself to exactly on the Alliance hit cap most efficiently (19SP + 10 Hit > 23 SP).

Similarly, the SP/crit gemming utilises SP socket bonuses to best effect (although on the feet you could argue that 46SP would be better than 31 SP and 20 Crit but it is close). Your gemming for haste over crit is likely sub-optimal for dps.

Whilst your baseline crit is higher I am willing to bet that the proc based nature of Gray's weapon (and trinkets) would even up the dps, although it looks like you have been luckier than him on trinket drops :)

Overall, I think that Graylo's gear set would result in slightly higher dps than your configuraton, everything else being equal...

First off, I am not and never have claimed to the best moonkin in WoW. Therefore I would not be surprised if you or someone else with a high level of gear could out DPS me.

That said, there are very few hard and fast rules for gearing. Just because something is right for you doesn't mean it is right for me. Here are some examples.

Hit: Yes I have two hit gems in my gear. I don't like it but it is the best way for me to get to the hit cap. You on the other hand have more options since you need a little more hit since you are Horde.

Plus, If built my set with the expectation that I will beable to get 277 level tier gear. Once I upgrade the two tier hit items I won't need the gems.

Gemming Haste is correct for you, but you have a ton of Crit rating. I on the other hand have significantly less. Plus, I have two proc based items one of which is triggered off of crits. This makes Crit Rating more valueable to me then it is to you and gives it a slight edge over Haste for me.

As Genaro pointed out my luck with trinkets hasn't been great. My 10man hasn't seen a single Spyglass since the instance opened 3 months ago. We have seen one DFO and one PotL. We also saw only two Heroic Reign of the Unlivings drop. When you concider a guild has 8-10 ranged casters that is not a lot to go around.

If my luck changes then I will be adjusting my gems to reflect the better performance.

If we assume that if youre useing thise trinkets you stil have some way to go to reach the crittcap. then critt is worth around 0.75 spellpower.

So the 84 Crit from Sundial would be worth 84*0.75=63 sp.While the Talisman would med you: 19+43.5*0.75 = 51.5spSo the net differance for the stats is only 11.5 SP.

So wichone comesout on top really depends on how you calculate the procctime for the sundial.And the ner differance is be smaller then 5-10 SP.So I'd cal it more of a matter of taste and wether you prefer an on use effect or a procc one.

And if your gear is better so you're actually above teh crittcap and still don't have a better trinket, it actuallly weights heavier in the talismans direction due to the deminishings value of critt rating.

Just a few more thoughts :)Love your math heavy bloggs btw. Matches my way of thinking.

It's interesting, because I'm exactly the opposite way from TyphoonAndrew. As a new boomkin but long-time damage caster, I love on-use trinkets, because there's invariably a time in any serious fight when it is desireable to blow cooldowns and ramp up the dps.

Apart from Starfall, treants and a quick typhoon smack (which are all diminished by the opportunity cost of a running eclipse anyway) Boomkin have very little in this department compared with, say, PoM followed by arcane power. The math on the two trinkets makes sense, but I find myself enticed by the control granted by the Talisman.

Are you quite sure, Graylo, that you would value this advantage at a mere 19dps?

Personally, I think control is overrated. It definately has it's advantages and benefits, but many people forget that it comes at a cost.

More control means lower up time because you're not popping the buff on cooldown. More control also increases the posibility of player error and slows down your casting speed because you have to hit a button.

Also, what happens if the high DPS phase is needed more then once every two minutes? Sure the trinket will help you get through the first one, but the second one will still be an issue.

I'm not saying that control is bad, because it can definately help if you have a phase where you need a little extra. However, most people that praise control only look at the positives and don't concider the negatives.

A lot of boomkins are using the Talisman of Resurgence because of gearscore. I don't know about your server but on mine, people want 5200-5300 minimum to raid ICC. They won't even reply back unless you have that amount even if you link your achievement.

Gearscore has screwed up a lot of things in this game and I really wish it was never made.

We use wow-heroes gs on my server, and I frequently find the guy next to me with a 3070 gear score does less damage than me by a thousand or two per second. They also often fail at the raid itself.

This works in wow-heroes, because it's not in game, but I personally made an equipment set basically for pumping up my gearscore as much as possible. I log out with it. Yeah, it's totally wrong, but I know I'm good enough to join in any content in the game right now so I don't care.

It would be *awesome* if wow-heroes told you what raid acheivments the player earned WHILE THE RAID WAS ON PROGRESSION. It could maybe even stick that in a tab all by itself. Then it'd be easy to look someone up and see what raids they've really done.

If someone completed BWL back in 2005, then they're hardcore. If they completed it last month, I don't care.

IMO the most broken thing about the PVE game right now is that it has become impossible to determine someone's skill easily. Even if you watch them in a raid, I find a lot of people can put up great numbers on some fights, but don't know how to handle movement, and they take forever to adapt and learn new mechanics.

Blizzard should give us a tool to use to help assess the combination of someone's gear level plus raid experience. Something like a 'ladder' score, which only goes up when you do something that is, at the time you do it, reasonably challenging.

I had used the Talisman of Resurgence since ICC until this last week I was able to get the Muradin's Spyglass. I was never able to get an Illustration of the Dragon Soul from Sarth becuz it only drops on 25 man and I don't usually get to do 25 man pugs. So the Spyglass was a huge upgrade for me. My other trinket was Eye of the Broodmother from Razorscale 10 man. Love the dps they both bring together at the same time, it's insane. Would of course really love to get my hands on a Reign of the Unliving/Dead, but once again those only drop on 25 man content that I'll likely never see.

In recent articles from blue posts, Blizz has said they think they need to add more trinkets and make them slightly easier to get, so hopefully this would mean that the drop rates would still be low but have more trinkets drop from more bosses, or the trinkets would only drop on a small number of bosses with a higher drop rate. Either way, I feel like 10 mans really got left out of any decent trinkets (IotDS and RotU/D), which I think Blizz needs to rectify in the future.

On a side topic, one thing I noticed about the two staves from 10 and 25 man ICC, Abracadver and Nibelung respectively, is that looking at dps charts, the Cadaver only does around 50-75 dps and is on a 15 minute on use cooldown, but whenever I've seen a Nibelung proc, which happens quite often, those damned Valkyr do like 1000 dps, WTF??? I mean, I know that the Nibelung has no other stat other than spellpower with no haste or crit, but come on, 25 man gear pushes people really close to both haste and crit anyway, whereas it's not as much of an issue with 10 man gear, so why the huge discrepancy in dps output from the procced npc? It would seem more reasonable for the Cadaver to do like 400-500 dps, cuz 50-75 is just too damned low. Maybe they should make the cooldown 3 minutes instead of 15? or just keep the 15 min cooldown but make it do more like 500 dps? I just think it sucks as it currently stands. They buffed Nibelung, but for got to buff Abacadaver in my opinion and they need to fix it asap.

TL;DR...we need more trinket options and they need to have slightly better drop rates.

Graylo, I think your posts are awesome. They're informative and give a good example of what a Moonkin should be like.

I've been a druid since I started playing WoW back in july 06 and been a Moonkin since Wrath release because I wanted to try something different. Since I've read your blog entries I never looked back to the other trees for various reasons (though I still do the occasional tanking).

To the point: I think this post was quite necessary as I've seen a lot of Moonkin around using ToR and probably thinking "woot Int, SPand a high itemlvl!", the mere thought that people think like that sends chills down my spine.

About your less frequent posting, I wouldn't worry about it if I were you. You always have interesting posts.

I am not trying to pull mine out and reach for a measuring stick. I just thought that conventional dps wisdom (that I learned from you) would lead you to gemming and gearing just a bit differently. I was more poking fun at your hit gems to tease. I view you as the authority on Booming so in my eyes you are the ALMIGHTY GRAYLO now and forever!!! But yeah more on topic with this post, I had not seen a single Moonkin on my server with the talisman until I raed this post last night. Today, I saw about 4-5 moonkins with it and I ended up rage linking them this site (as I often do when a bad boomer is being bad to "help" them) and was met with some very snide remarks.

Don't get on him for his hit gems. Myself I have three of the 12 spell power/10 hit gems in my gear. Had to get the hit cap somehow and had much better gear elsewhere. I lost maybe 10 spell power total and some crit rating by adding in those hit gems but I'm well over the crit soft cap and well over the haste soft cap so I didn't mind.

it's strange... I am fairly agree with you, but Simulationcraft still says that the Talisman it's better than Sundial. I've done some simulations to verify your calcs but there's nothing to do; equiping Talisman gives 100-120 dps more than a gear with Sundial. I don't know why because your calculations gives a good idea of the differences...And remember... in some servers (like mine) there's a lot of PUGs where RLs search for high geared ppl, and this trinket is 245 while sundial is 200... 45 is too much... I think Talisman will be the first item to replace, but i (again) think it's better to replace with something "superior" with better ilevel AND better stats.

I'll be the first to say I've gotten lucky for a primary 10 man moonkin (got IoDS to drop in a 25 pug and win it), but I've seen so many pug raids where I'm forced to spec resto and I'm surrounded by poorly geared moonkins with mainspec resto, using resto gear and that stuipd gorramed trinket to dps with.

I'll be honest here, I wear the trinket strictly as a gear score bump. Then right before the fight starts, I throw on my IoDS. I have found that using the GS with the IoDS I don't get into many groups and being that I don't raid that often, makes it problematic when I do have time for a raid.

What dazes me is this fairly hostile attitude towards resurgence, when as proven by math the difference is minor.I dont have addon for GS and am not planning to use one. But i do use Talisman of Resurgence. Pushing buttons might make one slow, but thats just about key binds and L2P. Some of the potency might be waisted on having the trinket ready/un used few seconds here and few seconds there, but hey, thats going to happen if your Sundial procs inaproprietly oo no biggie there. Labeling moonkins who choose to use this "bad" is, well, Bad.

Proof that Gear Score doesn't equal knowledge about stats. I admit that I've been tempted to purchase that stupid Talisman of Resurgence for my warlock, as it's annoying to have ilvl 200 trinkets equipped which makes you look unworthy gearscore-wise.

We have 4-5 regular boomkin in our ICC 25 raid groups, and we'll be featuring your blog (along with a short review) from our guild website Jechaiyeth on US-Hyjal Alliance.

I'm actually going to have to disagree with this post. First complaint is that via your math, you failed to reach any clear, concrete conclusion. You started it off with math and numbers, and then just stopped halfway and kinda started talking in circles about how they're roughly equal yet the sundial is "clearly" superior. There was nothing clear about it, and if they are "roughly equal" then it's not fair to say that the talisman isn't a dps trinket.

Secondly....the Talisman of Resurgence is actually better for some people. According to Wrathcalcs, with my gear, one crit is worth 1.02 dps and one int is worth .62 dps.

84*1.02 = 85.68 dps158*0.62 = 97.96 dps

In your math, you established that the proc for the talisman is superior, and at a certain gear level, the passive effect is also superior(and actually grows more superior the higher the gear level).

I doubt that this comment will be seen, being as my comment is a wee bit late....but it really is something that should be known. A lot of people(as you can see by most of the other comments on this post) will blindly believe almost anything that you tell them, and then spread that knowledge around. When that knowledge is false, you get a lot of people running around with gimped dps, convincing others to gimp their dps too. It is sad how many people in these comments are talking about "scrubs" and "bad"/"ignorant" moonkins....when *they* are actually ignorant and misinformed.

Sorry if my comment seems harsh or bitchy....it's not meant to be....just trying to set the record straight, and I get a little edgy when I see so many people degrading others on a basis of false knowledge.